Two days before India’s first novel coronavirus case was detected on January 30, Sonowal’s government started screening international passengers at the six airports in Assam.
Sprayed: CM Sonowal joins sanitising mission in Fancy Bazaar, Guwahati
Assam
Sarbananda Sonowal
COVID-19 and China’s Wuhan province were just making the global headlines in the beginning of 2020, but Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal was already making contingency plans. In the final week of January, he had an informal conversation with health and finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and chief secretary Kumar Sanjay Krishna on the issue.
Two days before India’s first novel coronavirus case was detected on January 30, Sonowal’s government started screening international passengers at the six airports in Assam. To stress the importance of social distancing, Sonowal cancelled all his public engagements from March 13.
Meanwhile, Sarma was handling the state’s response to the crisis on the ground. He even made the statewide lockdown announcement on March 24, a day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi clamped a national one. The minister has travelled all over the state, taking stock of the preparedness of the medical infrastructure while Sonowal and Sanjay Krishna monitored the situation through daily video conferencing with top officers and the local administration. A ‘chief minister’s special package’, covering more than seven million people in the state, has also been announced.
